After 36 years, The Long Story has published its last issue. It contains my latest novelette, “The Mongrel Gods of Thebes, Nevada.” We will miss this great journal. RIP

Category: Personal Journey

Faith is love and hope. Yes, faith has ingredients – look, and you will see them. I see them because I didn’t have them both for the longest time: the time I was dying of faithlessness. I see them because this is how it came to me: in parts, and assembled into a whole. Because …

There seems to be a parallel between Jesus among Israelites then and Jews among nations now. The sent child of God carrying a special relationship with God, the light and the truth and the life, a preacher of the New Law, leading by example, judged, persecuted, and killed. The chosen people of God, carrying a …

Where sex, love, and family are concerned, I am living what is most often termed a “celibate” life. I am hoping in some close future to declare that and other vows to the world and to my Sisters, but whatever the future holds, this has already been declared between God and me. That from time …

I’ve been told I forgive God too much. Have I forgiven God? I have. Was it too much? No. I spent most of my life carrying an unbearably heavy burden of blaming God for this world’s pain, and on the day they call “conversion,” when my heart quieted and allowed itself finally to feel His …

Perhaps, spurred by some recent posts, I have been getting more and more questions about my “choice” of religions. Why I became a Christian after I discovered God. Why I began to look for God. I have been asked this regularly since I made my faith visible to the world. Many frame their questions in terms of choice. …

I heard it said that only children who do not understand what death means are not afraid of it. It was a line in a thoughtful film, and it belonged to a character dedicated enough to a cause to give up his life should there be a need. It was about courage. But it assumed …

One day the door groaned and broke, and, almost blind and stupid from decades of banging, I fell through it into a new world—a vantage point flooded with light and warmth, from which I could see doors and paths around the doors, from which I could see warm hands and the Source of every hand, from which I could see the breathtaking landscape and the end-goal of every path. This poem is not my liturgy because even when “God” was not part of my spiritual vocabulary, that vocabulary was not limited to “head,” “door,” and “hand.” It included also “why.” The analysis of the relationships among heads, doors, and hands. The unwillingness to stop at acceptance. The refusal to go on banging on doors, hoping only for a stroking hand, without a grander reason, a structure, a purpose, an ordered universe. And so I screamed and prophesied and broke the door and only then knew, why.

I thrashed around my mind’s cage, constructing pyramids of theories and splicing religious traditions, practicing some ritual and then another with every group in heartfelt friendship but without faith, for one question remained woefully, obscenely unanswered: How can there be all this evil, all this pain in a world that belongs to an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God?

…if I were to refer to anything that’s happened to me as a “conversion experience,” it would not be to the day of my Church baptism. It would be to that moment which stilled the echoing mayhem of despair in my mind and filled and steeped my whole being in the warm light of Love personified. It would be to the day I understood enough to understand that I would never understand.